Despite the established position of psychotherapy among treatment methods in psychiatry, there are many questions related to various issues related to its application. The number of therapeutic approaches, which try to justify their accuracy and effectiveness according to the various crises that make people seek for help, is also quite impressive and still increasing. Therefore, we are pleased that some interesting articles in this issue of Archives take up this subject. A. Małus et al. examined the beliefs of psychotherapists regarding their perception of their own competence and on this background the way of dealing with the occurring failures. It is worth consideration that therapists mostly assessed their work well, and the reasons for failure were likely to be placed on the side of patients. As a kind of approximation of this problem, we can treat the case of difficult therapy of a patient with anorexia nervosa and co-occurring borderline personality disorder, whose authors [K. Kordyńska, et al.] managed to achieve only a partial improvement. They conclude that in such conditions the complexity of the patient's needs dictated the necessity of using a pragmatic combination of several modalities of help - integrative psychotherapy, dietary intervention, and also pharmacotherapy. .